The present invention relates to a method for processing a silver halide color phoptographic photosensitive material, which has a magnetic recording layer. In particular, the present invention provides a processing method having excellent properties of reading a magnetic information.
Hitherto, it has been substantially impossible to input or output information at the time of taking a picture or printing when a silver halide photographic photosensitive material (hereinafter referred to as "the photosensitive material") is used, and only optical input and output of the date of taking the photograph have been possible in the prior art. On the other hand, as disclosed in Japanese Patent unexamined Published Application (hereinafter referred to as "J. P. KOKAI") Nos. Hei 4-68336, 4-73737 and 5-88283, it is made possible to input the condition of taking the photograph (e.g., date, weather, photographic conditions such as reduction/enlargement ratio), number of sheets of reprints, a portion to be zoomed, messages, developing and printing conditions and the like in the photosensitive material. Further, in the input in image-projection devices such as televisions/videos, it becomes possible to provide various informations, and therefore, such a method would be hopeful for the future.
In processing such a photosensitive material, the material is usually processed in the steps of color development, desilverization, washing with water and stabilization. The desilverization methods can be roughly divided into two methods, i.e. a method wherein the bleaching and fixing are conducted separately from each other and a method wherein a bleach-fixing solution having the two functions is used. Particularly, photosensitive materials for photography have a silver content higher than that of printing materials, and silver bromoiodide is mainly used in the former. As a result, the load of desilverization is heavy, particularly, the load in the fixing step is heavy to necessitate a long time for the processing in the former. Particularly in the continuous process such as running process, iodine ion dissolved out of the photosensitive material is accumulated to cause problems that the fixing function is inhibited and that the accuracy is reduced in reading the magnetic recording. It has been found that such problems are more serious in the bleach-fixing step wherein both bleaching and fixing are conducted at the same time than in the bleach-fixing step.
After analyzing the causes of the deterioration of the magnetic recording properties, the inventors have found that silver sulfide remaining in a very small amount in the photosensitive material exerts a bad influence. The inventors have also found that the bad influence becomes serious as the concentration of iodine ion is increased and that such an influence becomes more serious in the bleach-fixing solution.